Saturday, February 04, 2012

How to Find Vacant Street Parking Spots

San Francisco is rolling out an intelligent car parking system. 8,200 street parking spaces now have magnetic sensors that are networked to report on which parking spots are occupied and which are currently vacant.

If motorists visit the SFpark website they can view a real-time Google Map of available street parking spaces. Colored lines on the roads on the map show which streets are part of the intelligent parking system scheme. The lines are also color-coded to give an overview of current parking space availability (blue = high availability and red = low). If users click on any of the colored roads they can find out exactly how many parking spaces are available.

As well as showing in real-time the availability of street car parking spaces the map shows the number of spaces available in the city's parking garages. The data is also available in a free app for iPhone and Android phones.